Browse

You are looking at
91
-
100
of
10,199
items

Making Order and Disorder through a Petroleum Project

Steffen Dalsgaard

This article contributes to debates about how capitalist corporations
‘see’, and how they concurrently relate to the places where they
are located. It argues that an analytical focus on ‘seeing’ illuminates how
internal organization and outward relation making are tied together in
complex ways. Even so, corporations of the extractive industries in particular
cannot be assumed to encompass a single coherent view. The empirical
case is a critical examination of how a gas project employed strict
health, safety, and security measures to generate order when encountering
alterity in an unfamiliar environment in Papua New Guinea. It reveals
how the project was organized around two conflicting ways of seeing its
host country—trying to separate itself from it while simultaneously having
to engage and provide benefits for it.

A Cinematic Case Study

James E. Cutting and Karen Pearlman

We investigated physical changes over three versions in the production
of the short historical drama, Woman with an Editing Bench (2016,
The Physical TV Company). Pearlman, the film’s director and editor, had also
written about the work that editors do to create rhythms in film (Pearlman
2016), and, through the use of computational techniques employed previously
(Cutting et al. 2018), we found that those descriptions of the editing process
had parallels in the physical changes of the film as it progressed from its first
assembled form, through a fine cut, to the released film. Basically, the rhythms
of the released film are not unlike the rhythms of heartbeats, breathing, and
footfalls—they share the property of “fractality.” That is, as Pearlman shaped a
story and its emotional dynamics over successive revisions, she also (without
consciously intending to do so) fashioned several dimensions of the film—
shot duration, motion, luminance, chroma, and clutter—so as to make them
more fractal.

Living Species and the Latency of Biological and Environmental Threats

Mara Benadusi

Discourses and practices of anticipation occupy a hypertrophic
space in contexts where uncontrolled industrial growth has inflicted grave
damage on peoples and territories, even triggering environmental disasters.
This article explores the use of nonhuman species as anticipatory devices in
a petrochemical terminal in Sicily, focusing on public representations of three
species: scavenger bacteria that play a cleansing role and underline citizens’
moral responsibility to secure their best possible futures through bioscience;
migrating flamingos that breed under the petrochemical chimneys, raising
the possibility of hopefulness by highlighting ecosystem resilience; and fish
affected by spina bifida, which reveal human health status in advance, communicating
the need to live in preparation for potential diseases. The analysis
reveals the highly contentious character of these anticipatory devices and the
contested ideas about possible futures they imply, thus shedding light on the
ecological frictions that have repercussions locally and globally, in discourse
and social practice.

Dan Gunn

The present article seeks to analyse the place of Shakespeare’s work within the oeuvre
of Gabriel Josipovici, starting with the latter’s first published critical book, The World
and the Book, and ending with his most recent, Hamlet: Fold on Fold. In the early work
Josipovici sought to establish a direct line between the Middle Ages and Modernism,
yet Shakespeare was already a presence whose plays obliged that line to deviate. In his
later critical work, such as On Trust, Shakespeare becomes one of the figures who allows
Josipovici to exemplify clearly the crucial gap he wishes to explore between saying and
doing. This gap is most fully explored in the recent book on Hamlet, where the protagonist
is seen as the supreme literary example of what happens when the traditions
governing doing have fallen away, leaving the character adrift in a sea of possibilities of
utterance and action, none of which has the feel of necessity.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Noa Balf

The Oslo peace process has effectively stalled and failed. In
this article I show that by positioning the Oslo process and any political
and civic forces involved with it as tainted by irrational and emotional
weakness, neo-conservative figures and institutions within Israel have
successfully argued for a hyper-masculinized Israeli security paradigm. In
this configuration, the process of cooperation and the acknowledgement of
Palestinian claims are viewed as weak and reprehensible, while aggressive
military strategies, deterrence, and the demand for unequivocal Palestinian
acceptance of Israel’s terms are perceived as rational and responsible
actions that protect Israeli interests. By conflating security with the state,
Israeli political leaders perpetuate the conflict rather than resolve it.

Israeli Orthodox Women Filmmakers

Valeria Seigelsheifer and Tova Hartman

Over the past two decades, Israeli Orthodox Jewish women
filmmakers have used film to speak in a public voice about various subjects
that were previously taboo. Although there are aspects of Orthodoxy
to which these filmmakers object, they do so as ‘devoted resisters’. Rather
than expressing heretical opposition, the women stay committed to Orthodoxy
precisely because they are able to use filmmaking to resist. In their
negotiations of voice used to ‘justify’ their decision to become filmmakers,
the women position themselves as ‘accidental’ filmmakers, thereby
remaining within Orthodoxy while critiquing it through their films. Cultural
resistance in this case is not carried out as defiance to Orthodox Judaism
but rather out of a relationship with it, featuring a form of resistance
that insists upon devotion to multiple commitments.

Constructing the Villain in Narrative Film

Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen

Many narrative films feature villains, major characters that audiences
are meant to condemn. This article investigates the cognitive-affective
underpinnings of audience antipathy in order to shed light on how filmic villainy
is constructed. To that end, the article introduces an analytical framework
at the intersection of cognitive film theory and moral psychology. The
framework analyzes villainy into three categories: guilty intentionality, consequential
action, and causal responsibility.

Belowground Agency in the Making of Future Climates

Céline Granjou and Juan Francisco Salazar

Despite soil’s vital ecological importance, its significance as a
belowground tridimensional living world remains under-theorized in social
and cultural research. Drawing on the reading of scientific literature and a
series of interviews with scientists working at the juncture of soil and climate
research, this article pursues a picture that highlights soil’s capacities to shape
future climates, including by fostering major planetary tipping points; we
elaborate on the cultural and ethical significance of that picture for opening
up alternative stories in which agency and change are not human-only prerogatives.
We develop a critical stance on the growing expectations of storing
more carbon into soils and argue for a better consideration of the situated,
heterogeneous, and volatile dynamics of carbon within soils. We eventually
call for more responsible ways of thinking about, and caring for, the myriad
conglomerates of living, decaying, and dead matter that basically make up
the stuff of soil.

Egalitarianism and Hierarchy in a Model Democracy

Marina Gold

The Swiss system of direct democracy is in many ways paradoxical.
The federal structure counteracts the formation of centralizing
state hierarchies and protects the egalitarian representation of local political
interests. Simultaneously, local political structures can have hierarchical
and exclusionary effects, especially when democratic processes are
turned into values. This article considers the tensions between egalitarian
and hierarchical values in Swiss democratic structures in the wake
of the rise of anti-foreigner and anti-EU passions harnessed by extreme
right-wing parties. These tensions are heightened in the context of global
processes that are transforming the structures of the state, as corporate
power undermines state apparatuses with the potential to subvert democratic
practices.

(Not) Anticipating as Moral Project

Devin Flaherty

In this article, I explore anticipation as a site of moral experience and moral willing
when death may be nearby. Through an examination of the narratives of the wife
of a hospice patient in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, I show that her commitment
to not anticipate the course of her husband’s illness is a moral project pitted
against biomedical modes of prognostication. In a context in which hospice care
is the only option available for many older adults in poor health, I discuss the
incommensurability between this position and the anticipatory horizon on which
hospice care is predicated: the patient’s imminent death. I argue for an approach
to this woman’s experience that takes into account the tendency for temporal
orientations to be thrown into flux when death might be nearby, without reducing
her commitment to not anticipate to mere avoidance or ‘denial’.